Archive for the ‘Speculative (Beyond Reality)’ Category

In Chris Bohjalian’s THE NIGHT STRANGERS, Chip Linton is a forty-year-old commercial airline pilot who is traumatized when, through no fault of his own, one of his regional planes goes down in Lake Champlain. In the aftermath of the accident, Chip, Emily, and their ten-year-old twin daughters, Hallie and Garnet, move from Pennsylvania to an isolated three-story Victorian near Bethel, New Hampshire, in the scenic White Mountains. Emily resumes her career as a lawyer, the kids enroll in the local school, and Chip becomes a do-it-yourselfer, replacing wallpaper, painting, and doing carpentry around the rickety old house.

Kicked out of his last American boarding school for drugs, Andrew Taylorâ€™s father has sent him to Englandâ€™s Harrow Academy to redo his senior year. Itâ€™s his last chance, and Andrew tries hard to follow the rules and not bring attention to himself. But author Justin Evans has other plans for Andrew in The White Devil, his latest thriller/horror novel that sheds light on the bullying and other nastiness that can go on at boarding schools past and present.

Illusion and reality intersect and overlap to reveal a luminous, mesmerizing character– Le Cirque des RÃªves (The Circus of Dreams). As the sun is the center of the solar system, the Circus of Dreams is the central character of this enchanting tale. Like a magnetic field, Le Cirque des RÃªves pulls in other characters like orbiting satellites around a bright star. This isn’t your childhood circus–rather, this is more in tune with Lewis Carroll or M.C. Escher–a surreal and hypnotic place of the imagination and spirit.

MILLENNIUM PEOPLE by J. G. Ballard is an important existential novel, not as some suggest about the corrosive effects of technology, but rather about the vacuity of middle class life. As the middle class comes to realize that all the things for which they have yearned are meaningless traps, they become consumed by a fear of nothingness. In response they seek authenticity. They find authentic feelings from violence and protest, the more meaningless and random the better.

“I didnâ€™t believe in demons; I ranked them with ghosts and vampires and werewolves, as products of a fevered imagination, or phenomena with a perfectly rational explanation. I did not realize yet, that summer when I was seventeen and my sister Polly was still alive, when the sun was shining and even the wind was warm and my whole body was restless, that there are worse things than being stuck in a small town for a year. There are demons, and they are more terrible than we can imagine.”

James Boiceâ€™s THE GOOD AND THE GHASTLY takes place 1500 years from now, after nuclear Armageddon has wiped out most of civilization. There are very few survivors in this blasted world where the oceans have risen high enough to flood much of the worldâ€™s low lying areas. Civilization has been rebuilt based on scanty and flagrantly wrong fragments of lore. Palin, for example, is the doyen of natural selection. All products are named by a status-linked phrase such as Visa Expensive Hotel. Visa is the generic term for government or other organizations or corporations.

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